What I would do differently in asking for a role change

I should have phrased my desire to change roles as a win-win for the business. Lesson one for product managers: package yourself and your ideas properly.

The way I pitched to the co-founder about my desire to transition to a PM role from an engineering role was to tell them that I’m looking to return to a steep learning curve, why I’m suited for the role, and hear what they have to say about current business priorities and needs for a PM.

One way I know I could have done better now is to have packaged it as “I want to try out a PM’s responsibilities to help my team.” This will likely come off as a smaller ask (hence, easier grant) and it will likely put me in better light, that I’m a high-performer wanting to do more.

A surprisingly good idea for sorting dropdown options on a UI

I realised today while coding a dropdown that it sometimes makes more sense to sort a list of options by affinity rather than alphabetical order.

Take a country list in a “Shipping address” form, for example. Say you are a platform that has a hosted checkout, and you mediate sellers and buyers. You already know that sellers are based in a particular country, so it might make sense to pre-select that country in the shipping country dropdown at checkout to save the customer a few clicks.

But we can extend that further to improve the UX even more. Maybe you know that sellers in Austria typically ship to Germany and Austria because the cost of shipping in those 2 countries are similar. In that case, perhaps you pre-select Austria for customers checking out with sellers in Austria, but you also strategically put Germany just below Austria. Then the rest of the list is sorted alphabetically.

This is called relevance-based sorting.

The “wheelhouse” of a company (lingo)

This is something I wrote about in an earlier reflection, but expanding on here: I picked up on the lingo that I intend to use more often going forward as I try to do more product work. Wheelhouse.

In the sentence I heard on a mock Facebook PM interview on Exponent:

This is more in the wheelhouse of Facebook, with its unique social graph that understands people’s connections with one another deeply.

It’s just a more vivid way of saying something is the “bread and butter” or the core business of a company.

For completeness, because I didn’t know it, I ChatGPT-ed what a wheelhouse is: a wheelhouse refers to the enclosed area on a boat where the captain steers. It’s where the controls are, and it represents expertise and control.